From September 24 to October 17, 2026, Wunderkammern presents Through Life, the new solo exhibition by JonOne, curated by Giuseppe Pizzuto. A body of previously unseen works traces the evolution of the artist’s language through color, gesture, memory and transformation. JonOne will be present at the opening on September 24.
Some experiences leave a mark, while others overlap, change shape and continue to resurface. This is the idea behind Through Life, the new solo exhibition by JonOne (John Andrew Perello), on view from September 24 to October 17, 2026 at Wunderkammern, Via Nerino 1, Milan.
Curated by Giuseppe Pizzuto, the exhibition brings together a body of previously unseen works in different formats, reflecting the maturity of the artist’s practice and the continuous evolution of a visual language that began on the streets of New York and, over more than forty years, has developed into a highly distinctive form of painting.
JonOne: from graffiti writing to abstraction
Emerging from New York’s graffiti scene in the early 1980s, JonOne has preserved in his painting the physical energy and expressive freedom that defined his beginnings.
Across the canvas, tags, calligraphic marks, drips, splashes and fields of color accumulate and overlap, making it almost impossible to determine where writing ends and painting begins.
The surface becomes a kind of palimpsest: each intervention preserves the memory of what came before while simultaneously opening up space for what comes next.
It is precisely this continuous layering that gives JonOne’s works their powerful sense of movement. Gesture does not simply represent motion: movement itself remains embedded in the painting.
Accelerations, pauses, repetitions and sudden changes of direction generate compositions shaped by an internal rhythm that recalls both the intensity of the city and the improvisational nature of music.
Through Life: painting as experience
The title Through Life captures the core of the exhibition: the idea of life as an open-ended process shaped by encounters, memories, tensions, changes and constant transformation.
In JonOne’s new works, fine ink lines coexist with instinctive gestures and layered fields of color, creating surfaces that appear to remain in a state of continuous evolution.
Each trace holds what came before. Each new intervention alters what once seemed complete.
Painting thus becomes a metaphor for experience itself: not a linear trajectory, but a succession of passages, overlaps and deviations.
In Through Life, abstraction is never detached from lived experience. Color takes on a physical and emotional dimension, while the canvas becomes a space in which different temporalities coexist, meet and transform.
I hope you feel: energy and transformation
At the heart of the exhibition’s visual identity is the previously unseen work I hope you feel, selected as the emblematic image of Through Life.
Dominated by vibrant shades of red, orange and yellow, crossed by darker marks and sudden bursts of light, the work evokes the unstable and magnetic energy of fire.
It is an image that brings together two central themes of the exhibition: energy and transformation.
The forms seem to spread across the surface like flames, also evoking a distinctly contemporary dimension connected to images of fires and extreme phenomena that have increasingly become part of our collective visual memory.
Without ever becoming a literal representation, fire takes on an ambiguous meaning: a vital force and at the same time a destructive element, an image of creation but also of the fragility of a world in constant evolution.
JonOne in Milan for the opening of Through Life
For the opening on Thursday, September 24, JonOne will be present at Wunderkammern, offering the public an opportunity to meet one of the international artists who helped bring the language of graffiti beyond the urban environment.
Born in New York in 1963 to a family of Dominican origin and raised in Washington Heights, JonOne discovered graffiti at the age of sixteen. In 1987, following his encounter with BANDO, he moved to Paris and joined the artistic community of the Hôpital Éphémère, a key moment in the transition of his practice from trains and city walls to canvas.
Since then, his visual language has progressively moved toward abstraction while maintaining a strong connection with the spontaneity, rhythm and energy of graffiti culture.
With Through Life, Wunderkammern invites the public to enter this flow: a journey in which mark becomes memory, color becomes emotion and painting becomes the trace of an experience in constant transformation.
Information
JonOne – Through Life
Curated by Giuseppe Pizzuto
September 24 – October 17, 2026
Opening: September 24, 2026, with the artist in attendance
Wunderkammern
Via Nerino 1, Milan